Stommel, a co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy (Hybrid Pedagogy, 2018) and a co-founder of the faculty-development event Digital Pedagogy Lab, recently returned to the classroom full time after several years of running Mary Washington's Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies. He spoke with The Chronicle about how professors bring a "full, complicated self" to the classroom, why he thinks students are marginalized, and whether colleges have really gotten serious about teaching. Ten years ago, the student-success conversation was largely about student affairs and financial aid. Now administrators seem to be talking more about the classroom. So are colleges taking teaching more seriously?

You may have heard the old parable about a group of blind men and an elephant. The men heard that a strange animal had been brought to town, and they wanted to touch it so they could understand what it was. The first man, whose hand landed on the trunk, decided that the elephant was like a thick snake. The second, whose hand reached the elephant's ear, thought it seemed like a kind of fan. The third man felt the leg and said the animal was like a tree.

I leaned over the shoulder of a student in the library. She was quietly working with headphones in, and completely focused. What caught my attention is that she would continually lift her phone up over the textbook, and then jot something down on the paper to her left. It was a motion and process that she repeated at least seven times before I headed over to see what was going on. As I got closer I could see that it was a math textbook, and her paper was filled with equations, problems, and steps.